Sodium thiosulfate protects against cisplatin-induced hearing loss in children and is not associated with serious adverse events attributed to its use. Further research is needed to define the appropriate role for sodium thiosulfate among emerging otoprotection strategies.

For decades, cisplatin-related ototoxicity has been dismissed or minimised, especially in paediatric patients. However, not only does hearing impairment create functional limitation in long-term survivors, but increasing evidence shows that it affects other areas, such as speech development, academic achievement, quality of life, and socialisation.1 In the past decade, several attempts to combine otoprotectants with cisplatin, particularly antioxidants, have been made to minimise the effect of cisplatin on hearing.

HUMAN KINASES DISPLAY MUTATIONAL HOTSPOTS AT COGNATE POSITIONS WITHIN CANCER. Pac Symp Biocomput. 2016;22:414-425 Authors: Gallion J, Wilkins AD, Lichtarge O Abstract The discovery of driver genes is a major pursuit of cancer genomics, usually based on observing the same mutation in different patients. But the heterogeneity of cancer pathways plus the high background mutational frequency of tumor cells often cloud the distinction between less frequent drivers and innocent passenger mutations. Here, to overcome these disadvantages, we grouped together mutations from close kinase paralogs under the hypothesis that cognate mutations may functionally favor cancer cells in similar ways. Indeed, we find that kinase paralogs often bear mutations to the same substituted amino …

In this study, we applied an alternative approach to identify potentially novel cancer drivers as those somatic mutations that overlap with known pathogenic mutations in Mendelian diseases. We hypothesize that those shared mutations are more likely to be cancer drivers because they have the established molecular mechanisms to impact protein functions. We first show that the overlap between somatic mutations in COSMIC and pathogenic genetic variants in HGMD is associated with high mutation frequency in cancers and is enriched for known cancer genes. We then attempted to identify putative tumor suppressors based on the number of distinct HGMD/COSMIC overlapping mutations in a given gene, and our results suggest that ion channels, collagens and Marfan syndrome associated genes may represent n…

Authors: Diaz D, Donato M, Nguyen T, Draghici S Abstract MicroRNAs play important roles in the development of many complex diseases. Because of their importance, the analysis of signaling pathways including miRNA interactions holds the potential for unveiling the mechanisms underlying such diseases. However, current signaling pathway databases are limited to interactions between genes and ignore miRNAs. Here, we use the information on miRNA targets to build a database of miRNA-augmented pathways (mirAP), and we show its application in the contexts of integrative pathway analysis and disease subtyping. Our miRNA-mRNA integrative pathway analysis pipeline incorporates a topology-aware approach that we previously implemented. Our integrative disease subtyping pipeline takes into accou…

COMPUTER AIDED IMAGE SEGMENTATION AND CLASSIFICATION FOR VIABLE AND NON-VIABLE TUMOR IDENTIFICATION IN OSTEOSARCOMA. Pac Symp Biocomput. 2016;22:195-206 Authors: Arunachalam HB, Mishra R, Armaselu B, Daescu O, Martinez M, Leavey P, Rakheja D, Cederberg K, Sengupta A, Ni’suilleabhain M Abstract Osteosarcoma is one of the most common types of bone cancer in children. To gauge the extent of cancer treatment response in the patient after surgical resection, the H&E stained image slides are manually evaluated by pathologists to estimate the percentage of necrosis, a time consuming process prone to observer bias and inaccuracy. Digital image analysis is a potential method to automate this process, thus saving time and providing a more accurate evaluation. The slides are …